Deepfaking disability

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A growing industry of content creators is teaching people how to make money from AI models, promising quick profits. Their strategy: steal content, alter faces with AI, and funnel users from Instagram to adult platforms. And one trend has caught the internet’s attention - Down’s Syndrome deepfakes. Rowan Ings and Nathalie Jimenez dive into the growing world of AI deepfakes, how it works, and hear from victims about the human cost of turning AI into a business of exploitation. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from BBC Trending in-depth reporting on the world of social media.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:06.0	Just a heads up. This episode contains references to pornographic material and AI-generated content involving minors.
0:13.8	Wow, you look incredible. I mean, how come you're back to your old look?
0:18.3	What can I say? I missed wearing black.
0:21.1	This Instagram video appears to show a young woman with Down syndrome,
0:24.8	wearing a grey top, a black skirt,
0:26.8	and lip syncing to the audio you just heard in what appears to be a bedroom.
0:31.0	But in reality, it's a deep fake that's been made for profit as part of a disturbing trend.
0:36.9	The Down syndrome profile was stealing this world's stuff from TikTok.
0:40.3	These whoever watches this, this person is 16, they don't have Down syndrome.
0:44.3	Like, this has been altered with AI.
0:47.7	I'm Rowanings.
0:48.9	And I'm Natalie Jimenez.
0:50.5	This is the documentary from BBC Trending.
0:52.8	In this episode, we're going to hear how people who have been deep faked have been affected by it.
0:58.4	Speak to content creators with Down syndrome about how it impacts them and try to trace the people profiting from deepfaking disability.
1:07.9	Deepfakes are AI generated or manipulated videos or images that look almost real, and they are all over the internet.
1:15.7	Deepfakes have been used for years to create non-consensual intimate images of women.
1:20.9	Over the last three months, we've been monitoring a trend that deepfakes Down syndrome for profit.
1:26.4	We found deepfake Instagram accounts with thousands of followers that led to OnlyFans accounts
1:31.5	with hundreds of likes.
1:33.1	The deepfakes are being used to grab people's attention on Instagram to get them to
	...

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